Into the heart of darkness

Reality is close at hand in TV's latest prison drama.
Michael Idato reports.

STEPPING inside the limestone walls of Joliet Correctional
Centre, it's difficult not to get a sense of the 144 years of pain
and isolation it has housed. The imposing skyline of tall, faceless
Victorian guard towers and impenetrable walls lets little sunlight
into the panopticon-style courtyard, leaving a chill on the 29
hectares of the prison's vast yet claustrophobic grounds.

Everything - the stark, stone shower blocks, the empty chapel,
the rows and rows of desolate cells - sits in the shadow of a place
described by one of its inmates in 1994 as "the closest thing to
hell".

"You could not recreate this set on a soundstage somewhere in
Los Angeles," observes actor Wentworth Miller. "I'm not sure I
believe in the idea of haunted houses but if there were ever a
place that's haunted, it would be Joliet."

Located an hour's drive from Chicago, the prison was built in
1858 using convict labour. In its time, it briefly flirted with
fame. Scenes from Natural Born Killers and The Blues
Brothers were filmed here and for a time it housed serial
killer John Wayne Gacy.

It closed as a working prison in February 2002 but has embraced
its celebrity status entirely and taken on a new mantle, as the
fictional Fox River State Penitentiary in Prison Break, a
stylised, serialised made-for-TV thriller in the tradition of
24.

Miller plays structural engineer Michael Scofield, who in the
opening episode holds up a bank and is sent to the penitentiary.
His plan is to liberate his brother Lincoln Burrows, played by
Australian actor Dominic Purcell, an innocent man sentenced to
death in a sinister conspiracy whose murky tendrils reach the White
House.

The series was developed by Paul Scheuring (A Man
Apart) out of an idea suggested by another producer, Francette
Kelley, that a man gets himself put in prison to break somebody
out.

"I thought it's an intriguing idea but it's pretty stupid of our
protagonist. It's just about the dumbest thing you could do," says
Scheuring. "So I had to answer two questions. First, why? The
stakes had to be so high, there was no other recourse, so from that
we found the condemned brother with the system against him. Second,
he had to be 100 per cent convinced he could pull it off, which is
where the idea that he worked at the architecture firm that had
worked on the retrofit of the prison came from."

The series follows the thriller style set by 24, though
it does not replicate that show's real-time play out.

Scheuring wrote the first draft of Prison Break in
2003, then as a miniseries for the Fox network. Steven Spielberg
agreed to executive produce it, but the project - as many do - then
kicked around in development. "It was unorthodox so in a way we
didn't know what to do with it," Scheuring says. "It sat on the
shelf for almost a year."

Spielberg bowed out to produce the film remake of War of the
Worlds and then, in late 2004, Lost premiered with a
$US10 million ($A13 million) pilot, a serialised story structure, a
tense, punchy mood and record audience figures.

"The very next week we were green-lit for a full season, not 10
episodes . . . our door was directly opened because of
Lost. A lot of serial-like shows on American television at
the moment are there because of Lost," Scheuring says.

As the series opens, Lincoln Burrows, inmate 19138, has been
sentenced to death by electrocution on charges of aggravated
discharge of a firearm and the first-degree murder of Terrence
Steadman, the brother of the US Vice-President Caroline Reynolds
(Patricia Wettig).

His brother Michael Scofield, inmate 94941, is newly arrived -
sentenced to five years for an armed robbery he deliberately
committed to ensure his incarceration in Fox River. At the time of
his arrest he was employed as a structural engineer at the
prestigious firm of Middleton, Maxwell and Schaum and, unbeknownst
to all, did under-the-table work on the blueprints for the retrofit
of Fox River State Penitentiary.

Which brings us to Joliet Correctional Centre, designed by
Chicago Water Tower architect William Boyington, lending its
imposing figure to make Prison Break one of the most
atmospheric, absorbing shows of the year.

"I was pretty adamant about not shooting this on a soundstage
and moreover not shooting it in the Los Angeles area because we
wanted to have a very unique look," Scheuring says. "The prison had
to be a character unto itself."

The production is based at the prison for four days of its
eight-day shoot, spending the other days at other locations or on
sets which have been built on a soundstage in the city.

Purcell describes the environment as intense. "It's an old
place, with a lot of history, and there is always a sense of
foreboding here," he says during a break in production.

When it premiered in the US, the series was almost an immediate
hit. Riding the wave, concedes Scheuring, can be tricky.
Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry, for example,
consumed a year's storylines in barely a dozen episodes. Scheuring
is confident he can keep the show unfolding according to the
template.

"Certain storylines get pulled up, but our larger template, the
first two years, which we sketched out entirely in terms of the
larger story arcs, is something we've managed to stick to," he
says.

There is a hint of romance for Scofield, with prison doctor Sara
Tancredi (Sarah Wayne Callies), who is the daughter of hardline
Illinois state governor "Frontier Justice" Frank Tancredi, and a
brush with the mob, led by John Abruzzi (Peter Stormare), one of
the most infamous prisoners at Fox River.

And there are agents Paul Kellerman (Paul Adelstein) and Danny
Hale (Danny McCarthy), a pair of secret service villains who aren't
above knocking off a man of the cloth to keep the truth of the
conspiracy that has put Burrows on death row out of reach. And what
part does the Vice-President play in the story? All will, we hope,
be revealed.

"We play it as though it's real but we're basically making a
comic book," says Miller. "The pressure mounts and the body count
rises and things become more difficult."

But, he concedes, while the jigsaw pieces slowly fall into
place, the big picture is still sight unseen. "It's always two
steps forward, two steps back."

Prison Break premieres on Wednesday at 8.30pm on Seven.

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